SCIENTIFIC DIPLOMACY, ACADEMIC EXCHANGE AND LOCAL APPROPRIATIONS BETWEEN EUROPE, THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain, France and the United States deployed in Latin America projects of intellectual and scientific influence closely linked to major transnational ideologies — pan-Hispanism, pan-Latinism and pan-Americanism — that competed with one another to define the Latin American cultural space and, with it, its geopolitical orientation. These projects were articulated through the circulation of intellectuals, academics and scientists; the creation of institutions of cultural intermediation; the promotion of journals, congresses and university missions; and, later, the consolidation of area-studies academic disciplines — Americanism, philological Hispanism, Latin American Studies — which not only produced knowledge about Latin America but also contributed, at the same time, to legitimizing the influence strategies of their countries of origin.
This symposium proposes to analyze these dynamics from a perspective that attends both to the sending countries and their institutional logics and to the receiving countries and their strategies of appropriation, negotiation and resistance. In contrast to approaches that have privileged a Eurocentric point of view or have limited themselves to just one of these actors, disregarding the context of geopolitical rivalries, we invite contributions that shed light on the asymmetric power relations that structured these exchanges, or that address the triad from a comparative perspective. The concept of epistemic hierarchies — the unequal distribution of power to define what counts as legitimate knowledge, which objects deserve to be studied, and which voices are authorized to do so — is especially relevant for accounting for the mechanisms through which the sending powers not only transmitted culture but also helped shape the intellectual frameworks with which Latin American countries themselves thought about their own identity.
The symposium welcomes papers addressing any moment within the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War, with no geographic restriction within the Latin American space. Perspectives from intellectual history, the history of science and disciplines, cultural history and the history of international relations are accepted, as are approaches from Latin American history that privilege the perspective of the receiving countries. Proposals dealing with concrete cases of mediation, transfer or contestation are especially invited, as are those that contribute to a comparative and connected history of the intellectual relations between Europe, the United States and Latin America.
